I believe the great CEOs understand both business success and personal success. My higher purpose is to disseminate CEO wisdom to help elevate business, the economy and society. My platforms are: host of the nationally syndicated Am/Fm radio show The CEO Show with Robert Reiss, and host of the CEO TV Show. We also produce The CEO Forum magazine, which is received exclusively by the top 10,000 CEOs in America. I recently co-authored, “The Transformative CEO” which was published by McGraw-Hill in 2012. One of my passions is sharing insights by giving keynote speeches on the topic, “What we can learn from America’s top CEOs”.

Financial services drive our economy. Consider this, the unrealized capital gains in the equity of Americans’ homes is now $10 trillion and the aggregate retirement pension and mutual funds now amount to $18.5 trillion, almost 20% bigger than the $15 trillion GDP of America. Being that personal financial security has a macro-economic implication both individually and for our country, I wondered what specifically leading financial service companies did to best serve their customers.

I found that the leaders use some unconventional approaches like removal of scripts from call centers, establishing designated teams to work with the elderly, and creating client advisory councils to both gain insight and elevate clients into true partners.

These insights came from a discussion I convened on February, 2013 with top leaders: Keith Banks, President, U.S. Trust, the company who pretty much founded the private client business in 1853; Gary Bhojwani, Chairman of Allianz a leader in retirement planning; and Bob DiMuccio, Chairman, President and CEO of Amica Insurance, which has won 13 consecutive J.D. Power and Associates awards for customer satisfaction among auto insurers and 11 awards for homeowner insurers. Also joining as an insight expert was Scott Lieberman who is Financial Service Strategy and Transformation Leader for IBM.

1. What is at the core of your customer experience model?

Bob DiMuccio, Amica: “It’s all about people. And to us it’s about the two groups – the customers and the employees. Our mission statement is, very simply, one sentence: to create peace of mind and build enduring relationships. We sell an intangible product. It’s a contract. You can’t touch it and feel it. But your judgments are made based on relationships, and how our reps make you feel. So for example, while you can sign up on our website, we always want to talk to you just before you make the final binding decision. As an example, we just had a large claim, and the wife said, ‘I called Amica, and the first question that was asked of me was, ‘Are you and your family okay?’ And she said, ‘From that moment, I knew we were going to be okay.’ So that’s our thought process in relationship building.”

Keith Banks, U.S. Trust: “The nucleus of our model is a private client advisor who partners with a private client manager. That team’s job is to intimately know the families we serve as clients and their needs. Once they begin to understand, they slowly and deliberately build a team of experts around that family. These experts are locally based so they’re right there in the community. And the experts can consist of people like trust officers, wealth strategists, portfolio managers, whomever it is but usually 5 – 7 people who are dedicated to that family. And their job is to deliver the full power of U.S. Trust but in a very high touch customized boutique like way. And that’s really a big part of our value proposition.”

Gary Bhojwani, Allianz: “Our two main operating businesses in the United States are Allianz Life Insurance Company which is life and annuities and Fireman’s Fund which is property and casualty between commercial and retail. So our model is about making sure that our agents who are independent contractors deeply understand and believe in the way we do business and the way our products really work.”

2. What unique practices do you have to connect with customers?

Gary Bhojwani, Allianz: “Since our annuities can be sophisticated products that respond to a host of market cycles and our clients may be elderly, we want to make sure our clients really understand what they need to know. So we created a special team that is trained specifically to help our consumers and perspective consumers who are 75 or older. We walk them through a host of analyses and illustrations to make sure they really understand what it is they’re buying. That type of dedicated team that’s specially trained to call out to perspective consumers, age 75 and older is something that to my knowledge nobody else does in our industry.”

Bob DiMuccio, Amica: “One unique practice that we employ is to make outgoing calls to our customers in areas affected by catastrophes. And the first question is, ‘Are you okay? Is there anything we can do to help you?’ Another unique practice is that we don’t actually have scripts for our folks on the front lines. Instead, we have guiding principles for them to follow. And we also give our employees the latitude to make the best decision in that moment because – especially when you have a claim – speed is always important. For example, a family recently had a loss and the roof was blown off the house. And at that time in their area, there was a major athletic event going on, and there were no hotel rooms available. So our adjuster spent several hours on the phone finding a safe and appropriate place for this family to stay because their house was exposed. It would have been easy to say there were no rooms available, that we couldn’t help them. However, this adjuster wouldn’t settle for that. It was personally important to him to find them a place to stay. The homeowner was interviewed and he said, “My family was safe. It meant so much to me that an insurance company worried about getting a good hotel room for my family. I knew someone was on my side.” To us, it’s all about doing the right thing. And there’s no script for that.”

Keith Banks, U.S. Trust: “Three years ago we formed something called a client advisory council. The idea emerged when I traveled around meeting with clients and getting important insight from them on how we’re doing, what we could do better, things they were interested in. My management team would do the same types of meetings and it became apparent that we needed to find a more systematic way to not only get that insight, but capture it and then do something with it. And so we came up with this client advisory council concept. The first meeting we had 25 clients from around the country council. Now we have five of these client advisory councils, upwards of 120 clients, currently working with us providing solutions on elevating services and growing the practice.

We also do a wealth and worth survey where we actually survey non-U.S. Trust clients to make sure there’s no disconnect with ultra high net worth individuals who are not our clients currently. We have a big philanthropic group within U.S. Trust that works with both individuals on their philanthropic needs as well as non-profit organizations. We do a very well regarded philanthropic survey in conjunction with Indiana University. And we use all the information to stay ahead of the curve and anticipate future needs of current and prospective clients. And we get a lot of good press because people want to see what ultra high net worth individuals are thinking about philanthropy. As a credible thought leader this also gets us in front of new potential clients.”

3. How do you create a customer centric culture?

Keith Banks, U.S. Trust: “I think one of the hallmarks of the company since 1853 has been the client being the center of our universe. It really has been part of the fabric of the culture. Anyone who works here must have in their DNA that our work begins and ends with the client. And if somehow you snuck through, we’ll find you and get you back out because we just can’t afford to have people in this company that are operating any other way.”

Gary Bhojwani, Allianz: “When I explain culture to people, the simplest way to define it at least for me is how are your employees going to act when nobody’s watching. There are three ingredients to our culture. First is making sure we have the right people where the interview process is essential. Not surprisingly we get our best hires as referrals. Second is the environment because the best people want to be in an environment that they love whether it’s subsidized lunches or a workout facility or a daycare center. Third since we don’t have a tangible product we need to make sure people understand this business from a broader perspective. I tell people all the time we don’t sell insurance. We make and keep promises. And I find that when you get the right people, put them in an environment that they love and give them a mission that they can relate to that’s about helping others, you create an unbelievable culture.”

Bob DiMuccio, Amica: “We have a unique culture. It’s customer-focused. It’s customer-centric. It starts with hiring the right people into this culture, and then we spend a lot of time on training, starting with an initial formal training program and then offering long-term leadership development programs. And we emphasize outside learning, whether it’s CPCU or CLU designations, and we also assist employees in furthering their education with MBAs and business-related education. We spend a lot of time making certain that people understand our culture, and we are a ‘promote from within’ culture. We’re looking for people with experience in building networks within a company.”

4. Talk about the future

Gary Bhojwani, Allianz: “There are a handful of key trends developing. The United States demographics shows 10,000 boomers retiring every day. There’s a trend of digitalization. There’s a trend for specialization. The fourth big trend we’re seeing is what I’ll call democratization of power. We can look across different places in the word and see as these younger generations in particular have a fundamental distrust of power. Now what we’re most interested in as we look at these trends and how they come together, we’re very focused on what’s happening with the demographics and how these solutions are going to be brought to bear particularly in the United States. If we think about 10,000 boomers retiring every day and the absence of real tangible retirement assets that they’ve already had, these are big problems that our governments won’t be able to solve because our governments don’t have the wherewithal. So we’re doing everything we can to make sure that we’ve got products and services that we can offer that are going to help aid these consumers to retire whether it’s using digital technologies, whether it’s making the minimum size of our annuity purchases as little as $2500. We’re trying to do a number of different things because we see these trends coming together in a real way.”

Bob DiMuccio, Amica: “Customers want to be able to access your products when they want, where they want and how they want. And I think customer experiences are going to change even further because of technology, which we see as a tool, but not the end of the process. There’s a quote that I first heard years ago that still sums up customer service for me: ‘People won’t remember what you do or what you say, but they will remember how you made them feel.’ ”

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Some great suggestions and examples, especially from those businesses that transcend commodity. And I agree, the focus needs to be on qualities and characters, techniques and formulas are secondary. Talking about the future and relating the vision are essential.